[C]onsideration of Tanaka’s steady move from purely religious to mostly secular themes should probably begin with a speech he made in 1886.

In November of that year Tanaka delivered a lecture on Buddhist married life which included comments somewhat different from his usual exegetical remarks. Edited and refocused somewhat, the speech became the basis of the treatise which Tanaka presented to the Emperor and Empress on their silver anniversary in 1894.

While Tanaka’s principal theme was the Buddhist context for the male-female relationship that imbues the entire realm of existence, he introduced a new element: the role of Nichiren Buddhism in Japan’s destiny. His sources are the pronouncements of Nichiren, and he reiterated the founder’s warning that Japan must be remade according to the tenets he proclaimed. Indeed, Nichiren came to earth and established his church for the sake of Japan; Japan must, accordingly, spread the faith for the sake of the world. The two, Nichiren Buddhism and Japan, were inseparably linked (in the same manner as man and wife), each essential to the other; and it was the combination of the two, each acting through the other, that would cause the whole world to become a vast Buddhaland.

Although Tanaka did not in this document explain precisely, as he did later, the connections between Nichiren Buddhism and Japan’s traditional cosmogony, he suggested that there were such ties. He argued that world unification was both a Japanese and a Buddhist goal; he noted that Nichiren’s appearance in Japan was a step in the process of world unification; and he implied that, inasmuch as the goal had not yet been reached, it was the duty of modern-day Nichiren Buddhists and the state, working together, to bring this about. This may be interpreted to mean that if the reigning Emperor Meiji were to adopt such a course his task would be hallowed not only by tradition (mainly Shinto), but by Nichiren Buddhism as well. There was, in short, at least a hint as early as 1886 of the Buddhist apologetics for the imperial mission to unify the world which ultimately became Tanaka’s major theme. It is significant that Tanaka concluded the 1894 essay with two valedictions, both the Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō (Hail to the Sutra of the Lotus of Perfect Truth) of Nichiren Buddhism and a patriotic rallying cry, Nippon Teikoku Ban-banzai (Imperial Japan Forever and Ever!).